Our internet banking/brokerage platform was partially down for several hours because of this screwup - fortunately, our customers weren't affected at all, only a good-sized portion of the intranet users (and a vocal bunch they are, I'm telling you).
After some headscratching we found 1) the failed crl requests in the firewall logs and 2) that IT security had enabled the "Check for server certificate revocation" option in IE, which is disabled by default (and fortunately left that way by all of our customers, apparently).
Thank you for ruining my day, Verisign. I'll return the favor when the time for renewing our certs comes around.
Our kiting club held a competition this year, and afterwards a guy from Germany showed us some neat videos he made by strapping a video camera to his Prophecy two-line stunt kite. The quality wasn't great (it was one of those cheap and lightweight battery-operated record-to-CF cams), but he managed to do some Axels, Snap Stalls and other neat tricks with it, and the video sequences were truly impressive.
I'd like to try something like that with my Revo once, quad-liners give you better control over the kite - you can steer the kite towards the ground full tilt and get it into reverse flight just inches before it touches the ground. Another thing that would be worth trying is doing a team routine with two kites and installing the camera on the chasing kite.
For an brief, nontechnical overview on von Neumann's life and his work, I can recommend "Prisoner's Dilemma" by William Poundstone. Apart from a short biography, it focuses on his work on game theory. Not very in-depth, but worth spending a rainy Sunday with.
The fine folks over at c't magazine have a short preview of the DeltaChrome Chip here (article in German, use the fish).
Summary:
DX9 chip, 300 MHz pixel/ram clock. The S8 competes with the Radeon 9600 and the GF 5600Ultra and 5700, a higher clocked variant (the F1) is planned for Q2/04.
Mixed benchmark results (from "faster than the Radeon 9600 in UT2003" to "30 % slower than the 9600 in Serious Sam"). Problems with current drivers (black screen during "bullet time" scenes in MP2, Halo Timedemo crashes @1280 resolution). Very low power consumption (only 5 W, chip needs no active cooling even in graphics intensive games). Some interesting features (HDTV out, filtering of block artifacts in videos).
Given those first impressions, I wonder where S3 will position this chip in the market. The high end seems to be out of reach, and in the OEM and value market they're vulnerable to the phase-out offers from ATI and NVidia.
A 10-megapixel image is nice and all, but Adams used everything up to 8x10 cameras, and there's nothing like that kind of resolution even in the planning stages for digital.
A 22-megapixel image is even nicer [Warning: PDF], and more and more professional photographers are switching to digital because of the advantages of end-to-end digital image processing. There still are some restrictions in high-end digital photography that make its use outside of the studio difficult or impossible, but it's matter of time and these will be overcome.
Ten years ago, most people laughed at digital photography. Today, consumer digicams are selling like hotcakes and the professionals are definitely listening, if they haven't catched on yet. Ten years from now, photography will be digital. There will still be some uses for traditional film-based photography, but it will be a niche market. And somewhere on this planet, the next Ansel Adams will buy his first digital camera and use it in creative ways the designers hadn't anticipated. Yes, Ansel Adams was an artist and a hacker in the original sense of the word in my opinion.
Another thing: no matter how big or fine-grained the film is, remember that the lens has to be able to resolve more lpi than the film, otherwise the film's resolution is wasted.
Just wait until my patent application for "inducing sexual stimulation in human males by repeated stroking of the male reproductive organ using either (or both) of the subject's own hands" is approved.
Keep in mind that in order to contest my patent you'd have to claim prior (ahem) "art" in front of a (possibly female) judge.
And if you say that you can't patent stuff like that, then why did these patent applications get approved, eh? (Link courtesy of another slashdotter.)
As far as I know, knx-hdinstall is deprecated with current Knoppix versions (starting June this year as far as I remember); the preferred method to perform a hard disk installation is now knoppix-installer. Gives you the choice to do a Knoppix installation or a Debian installation, too.
would be fun if one could download torrents from riaa, mpaa and whatever those....... are called
One of the all time coolest hacks was the downloading of the DeCSS source code right from the DVDCCA's name servers (documented on the "42 ways to get DeCSS" website here as item #9). However, the DeCSS source is quite small and wouldn't bog down the nameserver infrastructure too much.
Re:Javascript insecurity
on
Javascrypt
·
· Score: 1
Since javascript has to be the second biggest backdoor into your computer since MS Windows, it never ceases to amaze me that people can take this stuff seriously.
In an effort to win the browser wars by adding functionality, Microsoft dug their own security grave by adding a File System Object to their scripting engines - without it, many browser-based exploits won't work.
Goes to show that your bad design decisions will always catch up with you and that adding security as an afterthought never works.
It's also known that PageRank isn't a static formula. Google reserves the right to change it at any time, in what is known by Google-watchers as a "Google Dance"
I've always heard the term "Googledance" in conjuction with Google's index updates (which may or may not coincide with changes in the ranking algorithm). Much more information (with some interesting insight behind Google's operation) can be found here.
> allow meta-moderation of "overrated" and "underrated"
*rrated is abused far too often in my opinion. Here's an explanation from another/.er on why *rrated is not M2ed. I guess this would be easy to fix if the metamoderators could see the score of the comment at the time it was moderated (e.g. "Overrated at +3 Insightful" or something like that).
Also, it should not be possible to moderate *rrated on a post with no previous moderation. This would prevent troll moderators from immediately lower the score of a post from 1 to 0 or -1 and thereby putting it below the threshold used by most readers without being caught in M2.
Alternatively, we could rethink the whole M2 system, here are some ideas.
Calling Gator/Claria "Spyware" is inappropriate and derogatory in my opinion. In view of this fine company's outstanding efforts to expand the breadth of offerings that they provide to consumers and advertisers (they practically bend over to do it), their exemplary support of the legal community and the general openness of their offerings to hitherto unknown forms of espionage, I suggest we refer to Gator/Claria as Goatseware in the future.
The manufacturers include the little lever on the CPU socket for esthetic purposes only - you can install the processor just fine without using it.
Before installing a harddisk, be sure to throw it to the floor from at least 5 ft. in order to check if it can withstand the hardship of daily use in the system. When you insert the connectors, use lots of force and preferably a ballpeen hammer.
Always misplacing the product key of your precious original software? No problem, just write it on the CD/DVD with a sharpie pen... (is anyone surprised that this is a Microsoft Works DVD and not a FreeBSD CD?)
(D.A.U is short for "Duemmster Anzunehmender User" - dumbest hypothetical user. By the way, their D.A.U. of the month galleries are also something to behold.)
Oh please, not Microsoft harping on the full disclosure topic again! This is getting really tiresome, but if you're interested in arguments for full disclosure, Bruce Schneier has a good writeup (from 2001...) here.
The fundamental problem is that Microsofts products were never designed with security in mind - it was features that counted. Taking care of this is probably going to involve rewriting every single application from scratch, possibly with a different functionality (ActiveX/ActiveScripting as we know them today will have to go, that's for sure). To be fair, Microsoft is in it for the money - and I have no problem with that -, and of course it's easier to sell new features than security against some vague threat (until today, that is...).
Internet Explorer is an excellent example of Microsoft not getting this security thingy at all. ActiveX controls and scripts with access to the file system downloaded from the frigging Internet? This must be one of the dumbest design decisions I ever heard of. I just finished a 50-page paper on IE security for my company. My conclusion is that continuing to use it as the default browser is going to entail serious security risks for which there are no practical solutions. Unfortunately, we have no short-term alternative, but my recommendation is to move to a different browser platform in the next 2-3 years.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft is moving IE into the OS service packs, which is a QA nightmare waiting to happen: install the service pack (for bug and security fixes) -> break a few dozen LOB intranet applications, don't install it -> have IT Production and Security breathing down your neck.
Please, Mr. Ballmer, go back to monkey-dancing. You're better at being an entertainer than you're at being a manager and a visionary.
I recently had a similarly tainted search result, and after reporting the link (remarking that my searching for "Mozilla Firebird" didn't exactly indicate I was looking for "Hairy studs video") the offending pages were promptly removed from the index.
Unfortunately, they didn't honor my request to do something about all the eBay "associates" and other bottom-feeders that pollute the index using link farms and similar borderline tricks. As a result, Google gets next to useless for certain keyword combinations - not really a problem for me, since I know how to get around it, but I heard friends complain about getting very questionable results for their queries lately.
To me, this looks like a "don't byte the hand that feeds you" situation - Google probably depends on the revenue from their AdWords program, and it wouldn't do them much good to lose a major advertiser by effectively banning them from the index. Getting a top 10 placement on Google is pretty much a matter of survival for many businesses, so it's not suprising that all strings are pulled in order to achieve it.
I like the icons they made up for this story. Maybe Slashdot could use some of them with their permission? At least seven icons would qualify for any SCO-related story:
Friedrich Miescher, extracting DNA from pus-soaked surgical bandages in 1868.
Australian Researcher Barry Marshall, drinkingHelicobacter Pylori infected gastric fluids from an ulcer patient to prove the hypothesis that said bacterium was the source of stomach ulcers instead of stress.
Those are two researchers that got famous for what they were doing, countless others remain unsung hereoes that have not made their way into the books of science history.
This happens incredibly infrequently, especially considering the amazingly large amount of systems that run Windows.
I use Windows Update consistently for my Windows box, and it works great and reliably. The FUD surrounding the "user is gambling" anecdotes is amusing though. I can only remember them releasing one patch that was truly borked.
Where I work, this baby nearly slipped through QA (the error only occurs on certain levels of the Compaq RAID firmware, and the three original test servers had a newer revision of the firmware). Good thing one of the guys in QA (bless him) decided to do a little additional testing (and we use a staggered deployment scheme anyway), or we could potentially have faced 400 BSODing production servers.
The fact that WU works fine for your single box (as it does for mine) unfortunately says nothing about the regular deployment of patches in a 36'000 seat / 800 server corporate network such as ours, even if stringent QA procedures are in place. Keep in mind that security fixes mean tighter security settings and that those can lead to application problems which can be very hard to find without an inordinate amount of QA.
And by the way, SUS 1.1 might be fine for a small to medium network, but falls miserably short for large installations. We're praying that 2.0 will be better suited to our purposes because handling the pressure from the IRT case manager (who wants to deploy every fix immediately) and production (who doesn't tolerate downtime due to patch distribution) is not fun at all.
Last but not least: having things like DBMS file systems in future OS releases might be cool - but we can live without them. Me, I'd settle for an OS with less bugs and security holes, thank you very much.
Just give it to one of the guys who owned the equipment depicted in these galleries!
D.A.U ("duemmster anzunehmender User") can be roughly translated as "dumbest hypothetical user". Here is one of my favorites, the D.A.U. of the month for May 2003.
If you speak some German, reading the sarcastic comments is as much fun as looking at the pictures of friedequipment.
Slashdot Mirror
Our internet banking/brokerage platform was partially down for several hours because of this screwup - fortunately, our customers weren't affected at all, only a good-sized portion of the intranet users (and a vocal bunch they are, I'm telling you).
After some headscratching we found 1) the failed crl requests in the firewall logs and 2) that IT security had enabled the "Check for server certificate revocation" option in IE, which is disabled by default (and fortunately left that way by all of our customers, apparently).
Thank you for ruining my day, Verisign. I'll return the favor when the time for renewing our certs comes around.
Our kiting club held a competition this year, and afterwards a guy from Germany showed us some neat videos he made by strapping a video camera to his Prophecy two-line stunt kite. The quality wasn't great (it was one of those cheap and lightweight battery-operated record-to-CF cams), but he managed to do some Axels, Snap Stalls and other neat tricks with it, and the video sequences were truly impressive.
I'd like to try something like that with my Revo once, quad-liners give you better control over the kite - you can steer the kite towards the ground full tilt and get it into reverse flight just inches before it touches the ground. Another thing that would be worth trying is doing a team routine with two kites and installing the camera on the chasing kite.
For an brief, nontechnical overview on von Neumann's life and his work, I can recommend "Prisoner's Dilemma" by William Poundstone. Apart from a short biography, it focuses on his work on game theory. Not very in-depth, but worth spending a rainy Sunday with.
The fine folks over at c't magazine have a short preview of the DeltaChrome Chip here (article in German, use the fish).
Summary:
DX9 chip, 300 MHz pixel/ram clock. The S8 competes with the Radeon 9600 and the GF 5600Ultra and 5700, a higher clocked variant (the F1) is planned for Q2/04.
Mixed benchmark results (from "faster than the Radeon 9600 in UT2003" to "30 % slower than the 9600 in Serious Sam"). Problems with current drivers (black screen during "bullet time" scenes in MP2, Halo Timedemo crashes @1280 resolution). Very low power consumption (only 5 W, chip needs no active cooling even in graphics intensive games). Some interesting features (HDTV out, filtering of block artifacts in videos).
Given those first impressions, I wonder where S3 will position this chip in the market. The high end seems to be out of reach, and in the OEM and value market they're vulnerable to the phase-out offers from ATI and NVidia.
A 22-megapixel image is even nicer [Warning: PDF], and more and more professional photographers are switching to digital because of the advantages of end-to-end digital image processing. There still are some restrictions in high-end digital photography that make its use outside of the studio difficult or impossible, but it's matter of time and these will be overcome.
Ten years ago, most people laughed at digital photography. Today, consumer digicams are selling like hotcakes and the professionals are definitely listening, if they haven't catched on yet. Ten years from now, photography will be digital. There will still be some uses for traditional film-based photography, but it will be a niche market. And somewhere on this planet, the next Ansel Adams will buy his first digital camera and use it in creative ways the designers hadn't anticipated. Yes, Ansel Adams was an artist and a hacker in the original sense of the word in my opinion.
Another thing: no matter how big or fine-grained the film is, remember that the lens has to be able to resolve more lpi than the film, otherwise the film's resolution is wasted.
Apropos "whacky" patents:
Just wait until my patent application for "inducing sexual stimulation in human males by repeated stroking of the male reproductive organ using either (or both) of the subject's own hands" is approved.
Keep in mind that in order to contest my patent you'd have to claim prior (ahem) "art" in front of a (possibly female) judge.
And if you say that you can't patent stuff like that, then why did these patent applications get approved, eh? (Link courtesy of another slashdotter.)
> 3. Type knx-hdinstall
As far as I know, knx-hdinstall is deprecated with current Knoppix versions (starting June this year as far as I remember); the preferred method to perform a hard disk installation is now knoppix-installer. Gives you the choice to do a Knoppix installation or a Debian installation, too.
Goes to show that your bad design decisions will always catch up with you and that adding security as an afterthought never works.
Good points.
/.er on why *rrated is not M2ed. I guess this would be easy to fix if the metamoderators could see the score of the comment at the time it was moderated (e.g. "Overrated at +3 Insightful" or something like that).
> allow meta-moderation of "overrated" and "underrated"
*rrated is abused far too often in my opinion.
Here's an explanation from another
Also, it should not be possible to moderate *rrated on a post with no previous moderation. This would prevent troll moderators from immediately lower the score of a post from 1 to 0 or -1 and thereby putting it below the threshold used by most readers without being caught in M2.
Alternatively, we could rethink the whole M2 system, here are some ideas.
...not the REDmond pill!
Calling Gator/Claria "Spyware" is inappropriate and derogatory in my opinion. In view of this fine company's outstanding efforts to expand the breadth of offerings that they provide to consumers and advertisers (they practically bend over to do it), their exemplary support of the legal community and the general openness of their offerings to hitherto unknown forms of espionage, I suggest we refer to Gator/Claria as Goatseware in the future.
(D.A.U is short for "Duemmster Anzunehmender User" - dumbest hypothetical user. By the way, their D.A.U. of the month galleries are also something to behold.)
Oh please, not Microsoft harping on the full disclosure topic again! This is getting really tiresome, but if you're interested in arguments for full disclosure, Bruce Schneier has a good writeup (from 2001...) here.
The fundamental problem is that Microsofts products were never designed with security in mind - it was features that counted. Taking care of this is probably going to involve rewriting every single application from scratch, possibly with a different functionality (ActiveX/ActiveScripting as we know them today will have to go, that's for sure). To be fair, Microsoft is in it for the money - and I have no problem with that -, and of course it's easier to sell new features than security against some vague threat (until today, that is...).
Internet Explorer is an excellent example of Microsoft not getting this security thingy at all. ActiveX controls and scripts with access to the file system downloaded from the frigging Internet? This must be one of the dumbest design decisions I ever heard of. I just finished a 50-page paper on IE security for my company. My conclusion is that continuing to use it as the default browser is going to entail serious security risks for which there are no practical solutions. Unfortunately, we have no short-term alternative, but my recommendation is to move to a different browser platform in the next 2-3 years.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft is moving IE into the OS service packs, which is a QA nightmare waiting to happen: install the service pack (for bug and security fixes) -> break a few dozen LOB intranet applications, don't install it -> have IT Production and Security breathing down your neck.
Please, Mr. Ballmer, go back to monkey-dancing. You're better at being an entertainer than you're at being a manager and a visionary.
Ellen Feiss doesn't like it
8P
> I've noticed there's been a lot of tainting of the Google results lately as well.
Report those suckers using this form.
I recently had a similarly tainted search result, and after reporting the link (remarking that my searching for "Mozilla Firebird" didn't exactly indicate I was looking for "Hairy studs video") the offending pages were promptly removed from the index.
Unfortunately, they didn't honor my request to do something about all the eBay "associates" and other bottom-feeders that pollute the index using link farms and similar borderline tricks. As a result, Google gets next to useless for certain keyword combinations - not really a problem for me, since I know how to get around it, but I heard friends complain about getting very questionable results for their queries lately.
To me, this looks like a "don't byte the hand that feeds you" situation - Google probably depends on the revenue from their AdWords program, and it wouldn't do them much good to lose a major advertiser by effectively banning them from the index. Getting a top 10 placement on Google is pretty much a matter of survival for many businesses, so it's not suprising that all strings are pulled in order to achieve it.
Here's one of the Techno-Bill strips. A classic.
> Say what you will about their OSes, but VS is an amazingly well built IDE.
If you have Linux, so is this, by the way. Not quite up to par, but getting there. Plus, it's free as in beer/speech.
(No personal connections, I'm just a happy user)
I like the icons they made up for this story. Maybe Slashdot could use some of them with their permission? At least seven icons would qualify for any SCO-related story:
- "Inspires reflexive ridicule"
- "Psychological torture"
- "Risk of physical violence"
- "Futility"
- "Inspires hatred"
- "Political quagmire"
"Olfactory overload", "Involves digestive product" and "Zzzzzzzzzzzz" are also worthy of consideration in my opinion.
Friedrich Miescher, extracting DNA from pus-soaked surgical bandages in 1868.
Australian Researcher Barry Marshall, drinking Helicobacter Pylori infected gastric fluids from an ulcer patient to prove the hypothesis that said bacterium was the source of stomach ulcers instead of stress.
Those are two researchers that got famous for what they were doing, countless others remain unsung hereoes that have not made their way into the books of science history.
"Is that a 30 GHz Opteron beowulf cluster in your pants or are you just glad to see me"?
The fact that WU works fine for your single box (as it does for mine) unfortunately says nothing about the regular deployment of patches in a 36'000 seat / 800 server corporate network such as ours, even if stringent QA procedures are in place. Keep in mind that security fixes mean tighter security settings and that those can lead to application problems which can be very hard to find without an inordinate amount of QA.
And by the way, SUS 1.1 might be fine for a small to medium network, but falls miserably short for large installations. We're praying that 2.0 will be better suited to our purposes because handling the pressure from the IRT case manager (who wants to deploy every fix immediately) and production (who doesn't tolerate downtime due to patch distribution) is not fun at all.
Last but not least: having things like DBMS file systems in future OS releases might be cool - but we can live without them. Me, I'd settle for an OS with less bugs and security holes, thank you very much.
A netizen recently mentioned, in a discussion about Google, that his 12-year old daughter said "I have to google for my other sock" one morning.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I read this (the Web? IRC?), and googling for it yields no results.
Just give it to one of the guys who owned the equipment depicted in these galleries!
D.A.U ("duemmster anzunehmender User") can be roughly translated as "dumbest hypothetical user". Here is one of my favorites, the D.A.U. of the month for May 2003.
If you speak some German, reading the sarcastic comments is as much fun as looking at the pictures of fried equipment.